American Icons: Masterworks from SFMOMA and the Fisher Collection (Icônes
Américaines: Chefs-d’oeuvre du SFMOMA et de la collection Fisher)
Grand Palais, Galerie Sud-Est, Paris
April 8 - June 22, 2015
Published at Hyperallergic herehttp://hyperallergic.com/212090/revisiting-postwar-american-art-in-paris/
Roy Lichtenstein, “Live Ammo (Tzing!)” (1962) oil on canvas; 176.53 x 146.05 cm; The Doris and Donald Fisher
Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein; photo by Ian Reeves
Andy Warhol, “Liz #6 [Early Colored Liz]” (1963) silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen, 101.6 x 101.6 cm, San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, fractional purchase and bequest of Phyllis Wattis; © Andy Warhol Foundation for
the Visual Arts / ARS, New York; photo by Ben Blackwell
During Paris in the spring, one frequently meets beaming American newly weds on their
honeymoon. That identifiable lovers on cloud 9 scenario pretty well sums up American
Icons: Masterworks from SFMOMA and the Fisher Collection. No snark intended.
Curated by Gary Garrels, it is a tasty modestly sized show of postwar painting and
sculpture that merely demonstrates what is to come once they get home to San Francisco
where the Fisher Collection and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will form an
amalgamation. That union is a result of an unprecedented arrangement to house and
display at SFMOMA the massive art collection of Donald (who unfortunately passed
away in 2009) and Doris Fisher, the founders of the Gap. In 2007 the Fishers announced
plans to build a museum of their own in the San Francisco Presidio to house the art
collection. However, the plan stirred opposition from historic preservationists and was
canceled. American Icons includes a fraction of the 1,100 works from that collection of
185 artists that now have joined SFMOMA for good. On view are only a few (14) of
these artists with wonderful well-known paintings and sculptures by Americans. The full
union of the two collections will surge forth in 2016 within a new Snøhetta-designed
expanded building that SFMOMA is now building.
The Fishers started collecting art in the 1970s with fine art prints from Gemini or Tyler
Graphics that they hung in an office building for Gap, the retail company they co-
founded in 1969. Eventually they added paintings, sculpture, drawings, photographs, and
other media by American and European artists that were obtained from the likes of Paula
Cooper, Mary Boone, Marian Goodman, André Emmerich, Pace and Anthony d’Offay.
These buying binges brought in key examples of first wave Pop Art, Minimalism,
Abstraction, Figurative Art, and Color Field painting.
The Fisher Collection is narrow but deep, with often 40 or more pieces by a single artist,
such with Gerhard Richter (47), Ellsworth Kelly (45), Alexander Calder (40), Sol LeWitt
(40) and Andy Warhol (20). The 14 artists presented here in the mixing of the 2
collections each get either an entire gallery devoted to their work or share a very large
gallery with another artist to mutual benefit. They are all blue-chip white males (but one):
Calder, Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol, LeWitt, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre,
Richard Diebenkorn, Brice Marden, Cy Twombly, Chuck Close, Philip Guston and
Agnes Martin.
Calder, who first moved to Paris for a time in 1926 and then in 1962 settled in France at
Indre-et-Loire, opens the show with 4 delightful Joan Miró influenced works of utter
dynamic balance from the 1940s and 50s, including “Tower with Painting” (1951). These
early abstract motion experimentations show perfectly his engineering-technical acumen
mixing with his artistic sensibility for machine-like play.
Alexander Calder, “Tower with Painting” (1951) metal, wood, thread, and paint with oil on canvas mounted on wood,
101.6 x 152.4 x 42.2 cm; The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; ©
Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
This swinging Calder reception gallery is followed by one devoted to Kelly, where I was
very impressed with his early painting “Cité” (1951). It is a chance-based (originally
movable) piece very much influenced by his meeting Jean Arp while living in Paris from
1948 to 1954. “Cité” came from a dream Kelly had at the Cité Internationale
Universitaire in Paris and is constructed of twenty joined wood panels whose abutting
edges amplify the flickering rhythm of the painted stripes. The work reflects Kelly’s
belief that his paintings are objects, but the other early work “Spectrum I” (1953)
explores as well the retinal aspects of the color spectrum.
Ellsworth Kelly, “Cité” (1951) oil on wood, twenty joined panels; overall: 56 1/2 x 70 3/4 x 1 3/4 in.; San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the
Helen and Charles Schwab Collection; © Ellsworth Kelly; photo by Ben Blackwell
Following a group of typically freeform Cy Twombly paintings, there are a number of
very beautiful canvases by Richard Diebenkorn and Philip Guston that have been
juxtaposed in a room of sensual painting. Besides the Matisse influenced “Ocean Park
#54" (1972), there were two sensational gushy paintings by Diebenkorn from 1955
“Berkeley #23” and “Berkeley #47” that took me by surprise. Guston’s distinctive
abstract painting for his wife, “For M.” (1955), a small pinkness fracas, was intelligently
positioned next to his much woolier “Evidence” (1970), thereby bringing decades of
theoretical combatants to their knees.
Philip Guston, “Evidence” (1970) oil on canvas; 191.14 x 290.2 cm; San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, gift of the artist; © Estate of Philip Guston; photo by Ben Blackwell
Richard Diebenkorn, “Ocean Park #54" (1972) oil and charcoal on canvas; 254 cm x 205.74 cm, San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, gift of Friends of Gerald Nordland; © Richard Diebenkorn Foundation; photo by Ben
Blackwell
Then the show cools way down with a big gallery containing 3 Donald Judd stacks, that
includes the terrific horizontal “To Susan Buckwalter” (1964), some Carl Andre floor
sculptures, and two delicate wall drawings by Sol LeWitt, “Wall Drawing 1: Drawing
Series II 18 (A & B)” (1968) and “January 2002, Wall Drawing 1A: Drawing Series II 18
(A & B)” (2002).
Donald Judd, “To Susan Buckwalter” (1964) galvanized iron, aluminum, and lacquer; 76.2 x 358.14 x 76.2 cm; The
Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Judd Foundation / Licensed by
VAGA, New York; photo courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York; photo: Ian Reeves
The show physically climaxes with an enormous Andy Warhol gallery, particularly with
Warhol’s 2 silver chefs-d’oeuvres, “Silver Marlon” (1963) and “National Velvet” (1963).
Of course, it is with Warhol where the term Icon in the title of the show is appropriate, as
he piggy-backs on Hollywood movie stars’ promotional material, rendering stud Marlon
Brando and cute Liz Taylor as flickering, glamorous, almost devotional images in
courageous deterioration. For all those for whom art is message, that room has everything
we love about attempts to approximate the misty complexity of media.
Andy Warhol, “National Velvet” (1963) silkscreen ink, graphite, and silver paint on linen, 346.39 cm x 212.09 cm,
Accessions Committee Fund: gift of Barbara and Gerson Bakar, Doris and Donald Fisher, Evelyn, and Walter Haas,
Jr., Mimi and Peter Haas, Byron R. Meyer, Helen and Charles Schwab, Danielle, and Brooks Walker, Jr., and Judy
C. Webb; Albert M. Bender Fund; Tishler Trust; Victor Bergeron, Fund; Members' Accessions Fund; and gift of the
Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Detail pf Andy Warhol, “National Velvet” (1963) photo by the author
Andy Warhol, “Silver Marlon” (1963) silkscreen ink, spray paint, and silver paint on linen; 177.17 x 201.93 cm; The
Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts / ARS, New York
Partial installation view of Andy Warhol room, photo by the author
If you follow the commonsensical path, the show closes with a hat trick of Brice Marden
noodle line paintings, a shinning pair of classic Dan Flavins and three large Agnes Martin
meditations on tonality. Quality all the way down.
The 60s heavy artwork holdings within the integration of these two mega collections are
impeccable and impeccably installed. If there is a fault, it is that it lacks the punch of
d !o!u!b!t!. Only Warhol’s work continues to conceptualize doubtful questions through fragile
criticality: Is this painting? Is this printmaking? Is this rip-off? Is fame worth it?
Everything else in American Icons is a Masterwork that projects one aspect or another of
assured American self-confidence. Such a professionally polished presentation of
assurance conveyed in old existential Paris reminded me of what André Malraux said
about culture: that it is not inherited, but won through efforts to think and speak as an
individual against bureaucratic culture. It is a thought that closes the door on the criteria
of mastery if held as replacement for innovative aesthetic criteria. In that sense, American
Icons reminds us that art matters.
Dan Flavin, "untitled (to dear, durable Sol from Stephen, Sonja, and Dan) one" (1969) daylight and cool white
fluorescent light; 243.84 x 243.84 cm; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Phyllis C. Wattis Fund for Major
Accessions; © Stephen Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo by Don Ross and Katherine Du Tiel
Agnes Martin, “Falling Blue” (1963) oil and graphite on linen; 182.56 x 182.88 cm; San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Moses Lasky; © Estate of Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo by
Ben Blackwell
American Icons: Masterworks from SFMOMA and the Fisher Collection (Icônes
Américaines: Chefs-d’oeuvre du SFMOMA et de la collection Fisher) will move to
Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence from July 11 - October 18, 2015
Joseph Nechvatal
